In the modern society that values health, environmental protection and fashion, consumers demand higher comfort and design requirements on garment fabrics. In response to market needs of human wear, fabric manufacturers focus on making fabrics of different colors and pattern changes. If a continuous cord material can be embedded into a double-sided base yarn during a knitting process and be knit at the same time, not only a thicker and denser double-sided fabric having more pattern changes can be formed, but also the double-sided fabric manufactured may achieve more outstanding performances in fluffiness and shape sustainability. Such fabric is particularly suitable for making daily life consumer products including human outerwear, shoes or handbags. In currently existing technologies associated with a flat bed knitting machine that embeds a continuous cord material to be embedded, the embedding process of the continuous cord material to be embedded is performed by yarn stitching operations using knitting needles. Thus, when the length of the continuous cord material to be embedded exceeds 1 inch, due a certain inclined angle produced when the continuous cord material is fed by a yarn feeder, the continuous cord material may not be reliably stitched by the knitting needle in the yarn stitching process, hence easily resulting in an unsatisfactory fabric. That is to say, when adopting the above technology for embedding the continuous cord material, the length of the continuous cord material cannot exceed 1 inch. Thus, the development of fabrics manufactured from the above knitting technology also suffers from severe restrictions. It should be noted that, the flat bed knitting machine described refers to a model that includes a front needle bed and a back needle bed. During a knitting process, such flat bed knitting machine is capable of manufacturing not only a single-sided fabric by independently using one of the needle beds but also a double-sided fabric by simultaneously using the front and back needle beds that weave alternately.
To improve the above issue, the U.S. Pat. No. 6,151,922A discloses “Method of Knitting Inlaid Fabric and Inlaid Fabric Knitted by the Method”. In the above disclosure of the method of knitting an inlaid fabric including an inlay yarn (equivalent to the foregoing embedded continuous cord material), the flat bed knitting machine used includes at least a pair of horizontally extending needle beds arranged in front and back to be opposed to each other across a needle gap and each including a number of needles. Each of the pair of needle beds includes a plurality of knitting needles capable of transferring stitches of loops between the needle beds, and either or both of the needle beds can be racked laterally. The knitting process of knitting the inlaid fabric including a base knitting fabric portion (equivalent to the foregoing base yarn) and the inlay yarn (equivalent to the foregoing continuous cord material) includes steps of: a step that the base knitting fabric portion is knitted; a step that inlay yarn holding loops are formed by retaining loops of the base knitting fabric portion retained by the needles on the first needle bed to said needles on the opposed second needle bed through a split knit process, whereby the loops are retained to the needles on both of the first and second needle beds; a step that the inlay yarn is made to run across the loops retained to the needles on the first and second needle beds; a step that the inlay yarn holding loops retained by the needles on the second needle bed are transferred to the needles on the first needle bed to be overlapped with the loops of the base knitting fabric portion; and a step that a yarn is fed to the needles of the first needle bed to form loops of the next course. The above disclosure further discloses an inlaid fabric knitted by the above method. The inlaid fabric is characterized that, an elastic yarn is used as a base knitting fabric portion and a non-elastic yarn is used as inlay yarn, and the elastic yarn is knitted in its stretched state during the knitting so that the inlay yarn can be formed into a pile-like form. It is seen from the above disclosure that, one main purpose of using a non-elastic yarn as the inlay yarn is to maintain a final shape of the inlay fabric. Thus, only when knitting process of the above disclosure is complete, the base knitting fabric portion using an elastic yarn can then be shrunk back to the pile-like form. Thus, it is known that, in the knitting method of the above disclosure, the needles of one of the needle beds of the flat needle bed machine are applied for knitting the base yarn, whereas the other needle bed is used to transfer stitches of loops that maintain the positions of the inlay yarn after having been transferred. That is to say, instead of being capable of manufacturing a double-sided fabric, the above knitting method is only capable of manufacturing a single-sided fabric. Further, the inlaid yarn of the disclosure cannot be stacked in a predetermined knitting section, and may fail to meet consumer market needs. Therefore, there is a need for a solution for solving the above issues and limitations of the known technologies.